A high school student becomes a violent murderer in Ichi The Killer: Episode Zero.

Ichi the Killer: Episode Zero
OAV, 2002. Director: Sinji Isihira. 47 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $24.99. Distributor: U.S. Manga Corps/Central Park Media.

This is an animated prelude to Japanese “bad boy” director Takashi Miike’s controversial 2001 live-action sadomasochistic extravaganza Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1). That art-house thriller was released at five international film festivals before its Japanese general release and a lot more festivals since. The sadistic boss of a Japanese Yakuza gang has disappeared with its money. The gang, now led by next-in-command Kakihara, searches for him. They are intercepted by Ichi, a mysterious invulnerable killer who dispatches them in a variety of comically exaggerated, imaginatively gruesome manners. It becomes obvious that Kakihara is a masochist who had enjoyed being tortured and mutilated by their former boss and that Ichi is gradually replacing the boss in Kakihara’s affections.

For those who want to know who the mysterious Ichi really is and what turned him into such a pain-loving death machine, we now have the direct-to-video Koroshiya 1: The Animation Episode 0 (September 27, 2002, 37 minutes plus ten minutes of closing credits; animation by the A.I.C. studio). The action starts with Ichi’s confrontation with Kakihara (unidentified; it is assumed that Episode Zero‘s audience is familiar with Miike’s live-action feature), and then goes into a flashback. Ichi is really Hajime Shiorishi, a muscular but extremely sexually-repressed young man who is tormented for most of his adolescence by school bullies and abusive teachers. He lives in a small apartment where it is impossible to avoid awareness of his parents’ noisy sadomasochistic lovemaking or his little brother’s videogames that provide a constant background of images of extreme violence. His parents nag him to “be a man” and solve his own problems until he snaps and beats them and one of his high-school tormenters to death. His mind rejects all this and he reverts mentally to an amnesiac six-year-old. Therapists gradually turn him into a model citizen who can safely be released back into society, but the “shock ending” reveals how he ends up as Ichi the Killer instead.

The production makes skillful use of limited animation to present the story in stylized raw graphics suggesting dementia. The art style is bold and deliberately ugly, emphasizing closeups of cruel, leering faces and terrified eyes. Although Hajime is tall and handsome, camera angles convey his obsession that everyone is looking down in contempt at him. There are fewer scenes in full color than in monocolor; heavy black outlines and silhouettes on backgrounds of solid red (or blue or ochre or a dirty white or even pink, but usually bright arterial red).

Episode Zero is intelligently written, but the emotional situation is so exaggeratedly bleak that practically any normal person would either retreat into catatonia or go berserk as Hajime does. (His school looks like it should be a breeding ground for psychotic drop-outs.) This story of what turns a high-school student into a violent killer is complete, but for those unfamiliar with what happens next in the live-action Ichi the Killer, the ending will be confusingly incomplete. The DVD is rated 16+ with warnings of graphic violence, nudity and sexual situations.